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Hello, HPR listeners. My name is Jezra and today's episode will be about the what and why of my new audio recording hardware,

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which I just so happened to be using to record this episode of HPR.

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While preparing to record this episode, I fixed a usability issue I had with XFCE, and now I'm just super jazzed, so let's get to it.

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This tale begins in the late summer of 2020. At that time, I just finished building a cajon, which is a type of drum,

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that is a wooden rectangle that one kind of sits on and then hits with their hands. It's a hand drum.

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Once the cajon was built, I tried to make an audio recording of myself playing the drum.

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And no matter what I used, I could simply not get a good recording of the bass sound coming from the drum.

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At the time, it seemed as though the problem was related to all of the audio capturing devices I was using, whether it be a USB microphone,

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or my phone's microphone, it didn't matter. In hindsight, really, the issue was playback. I was playing back on either a laptop that had been taken apart so many times

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that it only had one working speaker, or I was playing back on my phone. Either way, the playback device could not handle the bass.

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That being said, in the fall of 2020, I decided to invest in some audio recording hardware from Sweetwater, which is a seller online of audio recording hardware for musicians and bands and whatnot.

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The order included an E604 bass drum microphone, an AT203-5 diaphragm condenser mic for recording voice, which is what I'm recording with right now.

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And a Personus Audio Box USB 96 little mixer thing, as plugs into my hardware by USB, it's powered by USB. It has two microphone input or microphone or instrument inputs, and it has output in the back for MIDI and headphones and simply line out left and right.

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On the front are some dials to adjust the two inputs. There is no software support for this device as far as mixing goes, which means all of the mixing must be done on the hardware,

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and I'm recording this in Audacity, and Audacity has no software control of the audio level. There is no Linux support from Personus for this USB mixing device.

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The mixing device does show up as a standard USB audio device, with kernel support I believe starting in version 5. Something. Once the hardware arrived, it was time to do some testing.

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First I tried to use the hardware with my Toshiba laptop, which is fairly large, only has one external speaker, a battery that doesn't hold a charge, and most importantly, the laptop in question has an incredibly loud fan, and if I was going to do any audio recording, I would want to use a computer that has either no fan or an incredibly quiet fan.

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It was time to find something else to use. Fortunately, I had a fanless device lying around that I could try out. This device was a EEPC702 that has no fan, it was a 32 bit machine, and it was running Debian at the time. Unfortunately, the operating system simply did not recognize the audio box USB 96 USB mixer.

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I then decided that it was time to buy a laptop type device that would be lightweight, fanless, inexpensive, and could do what I needed to do.

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In that regard, I purchased a Pine Book Pro. The USB mixer worked just fine with the Pine Book Pro, so I was very happy. However, I still had the same playback issue. I could not hear bass in anything I recorded, and as I said previously, it had nothing to do with the recording and always had to do with the playback device.

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The Pine Book Pro speakers simply can't handle the bass that I'm recording with the bass microphone on the bass hole of the cone that I created.

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In disheartened by what I thought was an issue with the recording hardware, I packed up the recording hardware into a little box and put it onto a shelf. However, I still continued to play with the Pine Book Pro and tried to improve it to the point where I would want to use it far more often than I had been using it.

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Originally, the Pine Book Pro was purchased very specifically for this audio recording project, but because it is a Linux-based computer, I wanted to use it for more of the things I use Linux-based computers for.

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In order to do that, I need Firefox and I need the terminal. What I don't need is a very robust feature-rich desktop environment.

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I like a nice, small, lightweight, quick desktop environment. If I have to have a desktop environment at all, the setup that came with Manjaro on this Pine Book Pro was not to my liking, so I switched to the XFCE desktop environment.

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Also, not necessarily to my liking. What I missed the most and what I couldn't do was press alt-space and have that start a application finder slash launcher.

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That is my primary way of starting a application on any Linux computer I have other than my phone. I press alt-space. There's a text field shows up on the screen somewhere.

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I start typing the name of an app. When it is found, I can hit enter and that app starts. That is what I want, and that is what I managed to do today.

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One must first go to the window manager settings and disable the setting that consumes alt-space. Then one would go into the keyboard shortcut settings and create a new keyboard shortcut for whichever app launcher one prefers and bind that to the alt-space keyboard shortcut.

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I did that today and I was unbelievably happy. The application I use for launching the applications is a Treb. I just call it Treb. It's really just a Python script with some GTK bindings in there and it works wonderfully for me.

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Now you might be thinking, well hold on a second there, Bob. If the audio recording hardware is sitting on a shelf collecting dust, why is it that you brought the audio recordings hardware back out connected it to a laptop with some software and did some recording.

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Well, the simple answer to that question is, I figured out the playback issue so that I can now actually hear the bass that's getting recorded and the easiest way for me to do that is by plugging into the Pinebook Pro, my USB headset, which has decent speakers and I set all the audio playback to go through that headset.

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According to LSUSB, the headset is a Logitech clear chat comfort USB headset and it has a built-in mic, which I've previously used for audio recording, but this audio recording is very specifically going through the Personus Audio Box USB 96 with the condenser microphone.

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Like every other audio recording setup I've used for HPR, this setup creates a very clean project and by clean, I mean, there does not appear to be any need for me to use audacity to do background noise removal.

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There is no background noise and for that I am incredibly happy. And on that note, I guess that's about it. Take care, HPR.